During the 1950s, thousands of mixed race children were born to US servicemen and local Korean women in US-occupied South Korea. Assumed to be the progeny of camptown women--or military prostitutes--their presence created a major problem for the image of US democracy in the world at a time when the nation was vying for Cold War allegiances abroad. As mixed race children became a discernible population around US military encampments in South Korea, communists seized upon the image of those left behind by their GI fathers as evidence of US imperialism, irresponsibility, and immorality in the Third World. Aware of this and keen to redeem the image of America''s intervention in Asia, US citizens spearheading the postwar recovery of recently war-torn South Korea embarked upon a campaign in US Congress to bring as many of these children home. By the early 1960s, American philanthropists, missionaries, and voluntary agencies had succeeded in constructing the figure of the abandoned and mistre
